Usually, indexable inserts are produced by powder-metallurgical means or by sintering, whereby WC/Co (wolfram carbide-cobalt, in general “hard metal”) is an important base material. Frequently, indexable inserts are provided by means of physical (PVD) or chemical gas phase deposition (English: chemical vapor deposition, CVD for short) with hard, abrasion-resistant and corrosion-resistant coatings to reduce their wear and tear and/or to make possible higher machining speeds and better cutting qualities.
The PVD method includes, i.a., thermal evaporation, electron beam evaporation, (English: electron beam evaporation), laser beam evaporation (English: pulsed laser deposition, pulsed laser ablation), arc evaporation (English: arc evaporation, Arc-PVD), molecular beam epitaxy (English: molecular beam epitaxy), sputtering, ion-beam-supported deposition (English: ion beam assisted deposition, IBAD) and ion plating. The powder-metallurgical production of actual indexable inserts is associated with various drawbacks; in this case of hard metal, these are primarily the following:                To achieve the very small grain sizes (for the hard material phase, <0.5 μm) that are desirable with respect to the mechanical wear resistance, fine-grained starting powder corresponding to high expense have to be produced and handled as much as possible under oxygen-free conditions.        The production of pore-free sintered bodies with homogenous structures is often difficult and not fully successful, and frequently requires additional technical expense such as hot isostatic pressing (English: hot isostatic pressing, HIP for short).        During sintering, grain growth results, by which technically desirable grain sizes in the nanometer range are not achievable.        Numerous promising, in particular high-temperature, material systems (e.g., alloys) cannot be fabricated or cannot be produced economically in the form of massive parts because of their high solidus temperatures.        The setting of special textures, such as nanometer-multilayer systems, is impossible with the powder-metallurgy agents corresponding to the state of the art.        
The physical gas phase deposition is known for coating but not for production of indexable inserts. Indexable inserts are usually produced from hard metal by means of a sintering method. It is known that PVD or CVD methods are suitable to deposit amorphous or less crystallized as well as nanocrystalline hard material systems. It is also known to suitably crystallize such layers by heat treatment. Because of the low deposition rates, the physical gas phase deposition is used namely for producing thin layers, but not for producing massive parts such as indexable inserts. If physical gas-phase coatings are run at low process pressures, the latter behave as “line-of-sight methods,” i.e., undercuts of the substrate are not coated or are coated to only a small extent, which in the coating of tools often represents a serious drawback that makes it necessary, for example, to control the movement of the tools to be coated during layer deposition.
There is a need for as economical a production of indexable inserts as possible with especially fine (“nanocrystalline”) uniform and, if necessary, high-grade anisotropic structures. In this case, the weakening of the powder metallurgy cited under “State of the Art” and the sintering are to be completely avoided. In addition, the parallel production of as many close-to-final-geometry indexable inserts as possible is to be made possible in a simple way and is to be economical.